PC-based controller that does PROFInet?

PROFInet? Hrm, appears to be some sort of architecture layered over TCP/IP using profibus rolled together with nice marketing buzzowords.

Now, Profibuso on the other hand is relatively common. There are PCI/ISA/PC104 Profibus cards for PCs from a variety of manufacturers.

It's a scheme for using DCOM on top of TCP to do industrial automation stuff. I'm not sure how closely it maps to PROFIbus, but there are PROFInetPROFIbus gateways, so I assume that there's a pretty good correlation between features.

Yes, I know.

Right, but I'm not doing PROFIbus. I'm doing PROFInet, so a PROFIbus board won't do me any good.

If it's anything like the other industrial offerings out there (eg. Devicenet/Controlnet, Modbus/ModbusTCP), there will be *very* good correlation between features.

You will probably find that Profinet and Profibus are nothing more than identical protocols run over different *hardware*...the OSI upper layers are identical, only the Network and below layers are different.

If this is indeed the case, all a Profi-net gateway will do is receive the Profi-bus packets, strip some of the header and checksum information (maybe), wrap the resulting data in Profi-net headers/checksum and send it on.

But you say that it is DCOM.. if this is the case I would suspect that Profinet is simply straight Profibus data transmitted using DCOM and unaltered in any way... but then I'm no expert ;-)

Cameron:-)

Profinet could become something very neat...if I understand it correctly.

My understanding is that Profinet creates an abstraction of data transfer at the controller level. Lets say you need to connect brand X PLC to brand Y PLC and you want to make sure that the data was transferred without any errors. Right now you have to do something clunky like use Modbus (LCD) and then you need to put all sorts of error traps in place. That's just to get the data from one PLC to another. But how do you know that it went to the right place?

The user interface to Profinet looks similar to function blocks in IEC. When I program my PLC, I make data available essentially via output pins on a function block. I also insert a couple of pins on the input of the block to tell someone else what data I expect to receive from another PLC. Then either I connect the outputs from one PLC to the inputs to another PLC or more likely the customer does it, this is done in the Profinet setup software. Profinet was supposed to become the next big thing in the automobile industry where they need to make sure that my paint booth will communicate to your conveyor line without any issues. Profinet has nothing to do with Profibus - just an unfortunate brand extension?

Cheers Steve B.

Camer>